Survivors of Monday’s North Bay firestorms used different words to describe the intensity of the wind-whipped, early-morning blazes that left much of Santa Rosa a smoking ruin, took at least 15 lives and left authorities looking for 150 missing people. By Tuesday, the multiple blazes in Sonoma, Napa and Mendocino counties were zero percent contained and more than 20,000 people had been forced to flee their homes after the worst natural disaster in Northern California’s recorded history.

As of Tuesday afternoon the fire was threatening the Oakmont Village retirement community and some 5,000 people were still in evacuation centers in Sonoma County—and nobody was being sent back home yet. PG&E reported that more than 100,000 people were still without power. Sonoma County Sheriff Rob Giordano said his department is “working on damage assessments so we can put people back in their homes” during an afternoon press conference where he stressed safety and patience. By Tuesday the death toll across the region had risen to 15, nine in Sonoma County, and more than 50,000 acres were burned in the Tubbs and Atlas fires in the Santa Rosa area and Napa County, respectively.

Santa Rosa police and the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office have been on guard against looters and the city enacted a dusk-to-dawn curfew; the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office closed access to mandatory evacuation areas and Giordano reported that increased police presence had contributed to “very few calls and no looting.”

Santa Rosa was a shuttered ghost town as of Monday afternoon, except for a Chinese restaurant that was serving through the smoky day. It started to come to life again Tuesday, but school was out, the courts were closed and the SMART train wasn’t coming. Twenty employees of the local sheriff’s office lost their homes to the fire, Giordano says. One employee of San Jose Inside’s sister newspaper in Santa Rosa, the North Bay Bohemian, lost hers.

“This is a huge event. This is an enormous fire,” Giordano told reporters. He added that he expected that there “may be a couple more” fatalities in the county.

The estimated number of homes, businesses or other buildings destroyed by the multiple fires was at least 2,000. The Tubbs fire, says Cal Fire spokeswoman Heather Williams, has claimed 571 buildings, 550 residential and 21 commercial. “There are 16,000-plus structures that are [still] being threatened,” she said. That fire started along the Sonoma-Napa County border Sunday night in Calistoga. Its cause is still under investigation, but the firestorm was assisted by very low humidity (11 percent) and very high wind gusts. The wind had died down Monday, but on Tuesday forecasters warned that offshore winds were picking up again and would blow 25 to 30 miles an hour from the northeast.

The damage is numbing in its scope and cruelly democratic in its reach: Rich and poor alike have lost everything to Tubbs. Local institutions are no longer: Santa Rosa’s Hilton Sonoma Wine Country Hotel and historic Round Barn in Fountaingrove are both gone. Classrooms and the east end of Luther Burbank Center for the Performing Arts are no more. Kaiser and Sutter hospitals each evacuated before approaching flames.

Santa Rosa’s Coffey Lane neighborhood north of Piner Road, lit by embers that jumped Highway 101, is a site of utter devastation. Block after block of middle-class homes surrounding Coffey Park were reduced to smoldering ash.

Long after firefighters and Sonoma County sheriff deputies worked through the early morning hours to save as many lives as possible, the working-class neighborhood once adorned with Halloween decorations resembled a burned-out city under military siege.

The National Guard was called in to assist, Giordano says, after Gov. Jerry Brown’s state of emergency declaration Tuesday.

Giordano noted that the county has fielded 240 missing persons reports, and the office has “located 57 people safely.” He encouraged families to contact the county Emergency Operations Center if they have a missing loved one and attributed much of the concern to the chaos of the moment, with panicked residents leaving their homes and heading to one of 25 evacuation centers—often without a cellphone or a charger.

“A lot of it is just confusion,” he said. “I’m glad we can chip away at that number.”

All over the region, gas mains roared with perilous open flames, and broken water pipes feebly spewed water onto scorched earth as the acrid smoke of incinerated beds, couches, cars and bicycles drifted through the air. Residents stood before chimneys that looked like gravestones in a smoldering cemetery, weeping and taking photos with their phones.

Seaneen DeLong, 57, walked south on Coffey Lane away from the fire with her yowling cat, Fritz, in a travel carrier.

“It was the best neighborhood in the world,” she said. “Now it’s a charred ruin. It looks like a nuclear wasteland.”

DeLong was awakened by the fierce winds that sent embers from the Tubbs fire to the east into her neighborhood and was able to get out with her cat and little else.

Scott Murray, 60, found the house he rents out to tenants—a place he raised his children—burned to the ground. So was everything around it. The absence of familiar visual reference points left him disoriented.

“It looks like Dresden,” Murray said.

His wife’s house was also gone, and he called to give her the news. Then he trudged across Coffey Park , where it appeared a car had exploded and landed upside down, to check on his home. He expected the worst but suddenly the scene of destruction stopped. Like stepping from black-and-white into color, the destruction stopped. His home, just a few houses away from piles of ash and twisted metal, was untouched.

Adding to the horrors of Monday night was the fate of the 200 patients who had to be evacuated from Kaiser Permanente and Sutter hospitals. Shawna Marzett, a patient-care technician at the hospital, said Kaiser was admitting ambulances bearing fire victims until early Monday morning, until the fire bore down on them from the hillsides above. Then it was time to evacuate.

“Looking through those big glass windows you could feel the heat,” she said. “We had doctors and nurses watching their homes burn while they were helping.”

Patients from Kaiser and Sutter were bused to Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital and neighboring facilities. A hospital spokeswoman reported that about 170 patients had come through with fire-related injuries by Tuesday, far lower than anticipated. Most were treated for minor burns or smoke inhalation, though a dozen patients had more significant injuries.

Williams at Cal Fire says firefighters have “worked diligently at the southern end of the fires,” to build defenses to prepare for the windy prediction.

Vice President Mike Pence was in Sacramento on a previously scheduled trip and he gave a news conference Tuesday focused on the fire and the federal response. President Donald Trump had just approved a disaster declaration, which means funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency are on the way. Pence spoke for many when he highlighted the work of first responders.

“Cal Fire is inspiring the nation, and we stand with them with great admiration and appreciation,” the vice president said.

He assured the North Bay that “more assets are on the way.”

Below is a photo gallery of the North Bay Fire aftermath. All pictures were taken by Dawn Heumann and Stett Holbrook.

]]>http://www.sanjoseinside.com/2017/10/10/north-bay-continues-battle-with-wind-whipped-firestorm-it-looks-like-a-nuclear-wasteland/feed/8NorCal Timber Conflicts Flare Up; Environmentalists Call for Reliefhttp://www.sanjoseinside.com/2016/08/19/norcal-timber-conflicts-flare-up-environmentalists-call-for-relief/
http://www.sanjoseinside.com/2016/08/19/norcal-timber-conflicts-flare-up-environmentalists-call-for-relief/#commentsFri, 19 Aug 2016 18:00:49 +0000http://www.sanjoseinside.com/?p=201125237After an era of relative quiet compared to the so-called timber wars of the 1980s and ’90s, conflict over logging in the forests of Northern California has returned.

A plan to log 100- to 150-year-old redwood trees across 320 acres of northwestern Sonoma County has generated fervent opposition from environmentalists and local residents over the past year. Clear-cutting of 5,760 fire-impacted acres in the Klamath National Forest kicked off in April, much of it on land previously designated as endangered species habitat.

The indigenous people of the area, the Karuk tribe, worked with local environmentalists to craft an alternative plan, but the Forest Service largely ignored it. The Karuk and the environmental groups have filed a lawsuit in an attempt to scuttle the logging. Last month, Karuk tribal members and local activists blocked the road leading to the logging in an effort to slow the logging operations pending a legal judgment that could come as soon as late August.

During the last period of conflict 30 years ago, regional environmentalists curtailed some logging operations by setting aside talismanic stands of old-growth redwood trees in parks and preserves, and by pointing out that forests provide important habitat to numerous species, many of them endangered, including northern spotted owls, marbled murrelets and coho salmon.

California is home to some of the most prodigious forests on earth, but the state’s lumber production has steadily declined since the 1950s. A similar trend also occurred in other western states. But now logging companies are coming back to pick over what remains.

“Companies have come in and gotten up to a 16 percent return per year on their timberland, but the forests are only physically capable of yielding about 1 percent per year over the long run,” says Richard Wilson, the former California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire), which regulates timber harvests on the state’s private lands.

As a result, soil that once grew trees in the forest has washed into streams and chokes vital fish habitat. The trees that remain—many third-, fourth- and sometimes even spindly fifth-growth replacement trees—hold back less floodwater, provide far less animal habitat and sequester far less carbon dioxide.

Even so, timber remains a major industry in California, particularly in northern counties like Humboldt, Shasta, Siskiyou and Mendocino, which account for about half the state’s timber harvest. Roughly 20 percent of that harvest currently occurs on public lands.

During Wilson’s tenure at Cal Fire (1991-1999), he sought to address the problem of over-harvesting by requiring that timber companies file 100-year management plans for sustaining the volume of timber in their forests, called “sustained yield plans.”

But the industry has used its political clout to undermine these regulations, he says, so much so that a large proportion of the state’s remaining timberlands continue to be degraded by companies like Sierra Pacific Industries, California’s largest timber company, which owns 1.8 million acres and relies heavily on clear-cutting.

These sorts of struggles are playing out across Northern California and will shape the long-term well-being of rural economies, the health of local ecosystems and the well-being of indigenous cultures.

Northern California’s forests make up the southern leg of the conifer-rich “Pacific temperate rainforest,” which extends from Prince William Sound in Alaska to California’s Central Coast. These forests contain the largest mass of living and decaying material of any ecosystem in the world on a per-unit basis, prompting many scientists and environmentalists to view their maintenance and restoration as crucial in the fight against global climate change.

Crown Jewel

The Marble Mountains are among the ecological jewels of Northern California’s national forest system and home to numerous old-growth conifer stands. In the 1990s, the U.S. Forest Service set aside many mature forest habitats as reserves for the benefit of old-growth-dependent species, such as the northern spotted owl, which is listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

In 2014, a series of wildfires known as the Westside Fire Complex burned across 183,000 acres of the broader region, most of it in the Klamath National Forest. In response, the Forest Service has designed timber sales that include more than 5,700 acres of clear-cuts, including fire-killed and living trees, many of them occurring in the mature forest reserves or on steep slopes above streams federally designated to promote the long-term survival of coho salmon.

The Forest Service often auctions off fire-impacted lands to timber companies for “salvage logging.” The Westside Plan is the largest post-fire timber sale in the recent history of northwestern California.

Klamath National Forest supervisor Patricia Grantham says that the standing dead trees in the forest pose a major long-term fire hazard. By aggressively logging these areas of the forest, her agency is supplying logs to local mills and biomass power plants, contributing to the long-term health of the forest and protecting local residents’ safety.

“When fire returns to the area in the future, it will be smaller and less severe because of the actions we’re taking on the landscape today,” Grantham says.

But environmentalists and tribal members regard the Westside Plan as a giveaway to the timber industry of historic proportions.

“The Westside [Plan] is absolutely the worst project I’ve ever seen in Pacific Northwest national forests,” says Kimberly Baker, of the Arcata-based Environmental Protection Information Center (EPIC). She has been monitoring timber sales on national forests for the past 18 years.

The Karuk tribe, EPIC and three other environmental groups have filed suit in federal court to challenge the project. Logging began in April, and it is unclear how much of the land will remain intact when the judge reaches a verdict. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has also expressed skepticism regarding the Forest Service’s proposal, noting that dead trees “greatly improve” the quality of habitat for spotted owls and other creatures as the forest naturally recovers over time.

According to Fish and Wildlife’s estimate, the Westside Plan could lead to the deaths of 103 northern spotted owls—at least 1 percent of the species’ entire population.

Many of the slopes where the logging is occurring are among the most unstable in the Klamath National Forest. They also happen to be right above several of the Klamath’s most important salmon-bearing streams. By removing anchoring vegetation and carving a spider-web pattern of roads and log landings, the logging threatens to bury the streams with silt.

The Karuk tribe worked with environmental groups to develop an alternative plan that would rely on prescribed fires to regenerate the land over the long run. Logging would be confined to ridgelines, for the purpose of developing fuel breaks, such that some logs would still feed local mills. Much of the Klamath Forest is the Karuk’s aboriginal territory.

The Forest Service’s Grantham says she incorporated most of the Karuk’s input, but Karuk tribe natural resources adviser Craig Tucker says that simply isn’t true. “In reality, the Forest Service basically told us we can go pound sand,” he says, regarding the agency’s response to the Karuk management plan.

According to public records, the Forest Service has spent approximately $24 million developing the Westside logging plan and is auctioning most of the logs for a paltry $2.50 per truckload, thus generating only about $450,000 in revenue for the agency.

“The Karuk tribe’s been here for at least 10,000 years,” Tucker says. “The Forest Service has been here for about a hundred. Yet they don’t listen.”

Wilson, the former Cal Fire chief, says that battles between environmentalists and timber companies will continue until the law limits harvesting practices to sustainable levels that balance the needs of local residents and other species.

“Most of the public doesn’t realize we still have a long way to go to get to sustainability,” he says.